The Questions are More Important Than the Answers

Tag Archives: content

Central banks

Since I started learning about bitcoin as an alternative to traditional paper money, I have often wondered why we have come to accept banking as it is constituted today. There are lots of problems with the current banking system but we are so conditioned to it that we don’t consider it’s problems to be problems.

We accept all the problems with banking to be normal. Is it normal that a signed cheque should take days to clear? Why is it expensive to send money from the west to developing countries? Why do banks close at a certain time? Why is access to my own money controlled by institutions like banks and governments?

Central banks decide how much money to print and put into circulation. They are causing financial exclusion by their actions. Is poverty a conscious decision made by banks and those who control them?

There are many questions that need answers but most people have never thought to ask. We have never realised there are problems until bitcoin started solving them.

Fiat currency

Fiat currency is backed by the trust we place in the government issuing it. When we begin to lose trust in the issuing authority, then the currency crumbles like a deck of cards.

Fiat currencies have crumbled in many countries including Zimbabwe. The question is why? Why do we lose trust in government and central banks? Their decisions have caused financial exclusion. There are billions of people across the who are either unbanked or underbanked. The golabal financial system has failed to appreciate the value that these people bring to the table.

Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin is a financial disruptor. It is a peer to peer payment system without a central controlling authority. Anyone can participate including the unbanked and underbanked. Its value is derived from its network of users

Bitcoin solves all the problems that we are facing with banks and institutions.

Time Is The New Currency

Time is the greatest asset that we have. Everything we do has to be done in space and in time. We can change our area, we can go anywhere on this planet and later in the universe, but we can not recover time. Once it is gone, that’s it. We can not get it back. We can avoid wasting time by pondering on time lost.

Now is an excellent opportunity to talk about time because we have become rushed as a human species. We have so much to do, and we just don't seem to get enough time in the 24 hours we have. Some people have to sleep fewer hours just to catch up. So how do you manage to get ahead of time or are you always playing catch up?

Wasting Time

Lets us consider some of the ways through which we are wasting our time. Social media is a big consumer of time especially WhatsApp from my experience. The biggest time wasters on WhatsApp are groups. There is a wealth of useful information from the discussions there, but the problem is that we consume information at the expense of creating content. It's a catch 22 situation where the information is valuable but so is the time. Once we have wasted our time on social media, we can never get it back. Time is our greatest currency, and we need to stop wasting it. Reading this post, you will find that you are aware of most of the things here but never really got to think about them and to limit the amount of time you spend consuming content.

I have been reading many books and listening to many podcasts; watching many videos, participating in many discussions on social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp, then realised that most of the information I was reading was just repetition. One day I decided to suspend consumption and embark on serious content creation. It was tough, but I decided to serve the suspension until 31st December 2017. I want to see how much content I can create in these six months. Are you using a todo list because that certainly helps? I do use a todo list, and it has made my life a lot better. The list is a good reminder of what we need to get done. When you have a list, some things take priority over others. If you want to reduce content consumption, you have to replace it with creation. Having idle time in our lives is tough. When we have nothing to do, we look for entertainment.

Entertainment

Entertainment is probably the biggest contributor to time wasting. Besides education and learning, we find entertainment in the content we consume. Every content creator is looking to either entertain or educate, or both. Most people would rather find entertainment than education. If the training helps them to access or enjoy the show, then they will gladly go for it. That is just the reality. So with a background in physics education, I am more inclined to educate than to entertain. But I must educate on things that I know, and do. If I can also treat in the process of education, then I would have hit the jackpot. Most comedians have an educational message behind the jokes. Pastors educate and entertain. Some do more of teaching than entertainment, and vice-versa.

You need time to get things done. If you're consuming content, you need time. To create content, you also need time. Now, you spend time and probably money, to consume content, and you spend time and sometimes some money, but you do get paid for the content if you know how. It's hard to get paid for consuming content. If it happens, then there is a catch. There is no free lunch!

Avoid Wasting Time

How do you stop spending time-consuming content so that you can use it to create content? Well, it is possible to create content out of the things that we consume. The easiest example is this; video gamers are recording themselves playing video games, then putting the videos on YouTube, and monetizing those videos. They are getting over one million dollars a year doing that. They enjoy playing video games, but they are getting paid for doing something they love doing. That is the definition of the perfect occupation. Most people crave entertainment after their boring jobs. That is just sad, to live for the weekend, to wait for that holiday. How many people dread Mondays, and enjoy Mondays? The majority I would say. Ask these people how they spend their time? They spend time chasing entertainment.

The Good News

The good news is that you do not need to stop doing the things you are already doing. You can find ways of monetising the things you consider entertainment. Let's consider someone who likes to watch football. Remember the guy who knew all the football players when we were young? The person who remembered every world cup goal? Today that person is called a blogger. They are called football pundits. They are a YouTube sensation. Some of those job descriptions did not exist before the web. They do now, thanks to the innovation of a few individuals.

The internet has democratised wealth creation. That's a good thing, but the problem is that most people are not taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the web. There’s the mistaken belief that social media platforms are a waste of time. It is true if you’re not using them to save time. A lot of businesses sell you products that save you time. As mass communications tools, social media platforms are saving us time to communicate with our families and friends, and customers. Communication is still the key word for all these platforms. 20 Years ago we would have been waiting days to receive a reply through a letter. We would also need to wait for major media organisations to wait for news of what is happening around the world. Now an ordinary person with a smartphone and an internet connection can go live on Facebook with breaking news.

And The Challenge

The challenge is to repackage what you already do into sellable goods and services. Entrepreneurs create a product or service that saves people time; that's where the money is. That’s what Uber and Amazon and other successful corporations sell. Entrepreneurship is about reverse engineering the saving of TIME. Physics has not yet figured out possible time travel, so until that day, save it!

If you say you are a musician, then you should be producing music nonstop. There’s no other way to be a musician if you’re not creating music. It’s that simple.

Bear in mind that you’re not the only musician. You’re not the only one who is practicing the same craft as you. Innovations in technology have democratized content creation. That means anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection anywhere in The World can produce content. They can do exactly the thing that you’re doing. The possibilities have reached abundance status but so has the competition. There’s a race to abundant content creation. The winners are those who create more content. They will produce a lot of content which will go unnoticed, but the gems are what The World will appreciate and remember. The World does not remember the many times you fell; they remember the few times you got straight up and kept going.

People become experts in particular disciplines because they repeat the same things every day. The more you repeat something, the better you become at it. People don’t care about the things you don’t know or can’t do. They’re happy to have you as an expert in that one field. You wouldn’t want a medical doctor fixing your car before a long trip or a car mechanic performing heart surgery on you. It took the doctor seven years of training and repetition to even be allowed to start practice. The motor mechanic takes some time to achieve mastery. His skills need upgrading all the time as the technology continues to evolve and the cars become more sophisticated, just like any occupation.

As a content creator, the same principles apply. You have to produce a ridiculous amount of content. You have to put in the work. That is how you become better and more comfortable with it. If you’re a YouTuber, you want to look natural on camera. You want to look like part of the furniture. You can only achieve that through shooting videos every day many times a day. The cost of doing is almost zero. You don’t to break an arm and a leg to get started. If you already have a smartphone and an internet connection, then you’re ready to go. So how do you get started shooting video? You start shooting video right now or right today. The only way to get started is to start. There’s no other magic besides that. Once you have made your first video, make your second, and you’re third and just keep going. Not only do most people have a smartphone and an internet connection, but we now also have a lot of app stores and free apps for video editing and for uploading videos to web platforms where people can consume the content.

Making raw video footage then editing and distribution is one way, we now have new media platforms that allow us to produce native video content within the app. As a video producer one now has access to apps such as Facebook for Facebook live, Snapchat and Instagram for short video and one can even go live on Instagram. There are apps like and Live Air Solo, Wirecast Go, and Livestream that allow one to go live on YouTube from anywhere with an internet connection. Twitter now allows you to go live with the integrated Periscope app. These are the prominent ones, but there are plenty more. The YouTube app itself allows you to go live. There’s just no room for excuses. Technology is suffocating those who like to make excuses as a strategy for procrastination. There’s just no place for the reasons industry. The reasons industry is the biggest driver of poverty in this day and age. In my culture, there’s a saying that one cannot suffer from thirst when they are knee deep in water.

If your strengths are with the spoken word, if your passion is radio, then today you can start a radio station. Podcasting is the new radio. A good place to start is Anchor.fm. You can record up to 5 minutes of audio, you can add some background music to it, and once you publish it, you can share your story on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. A cool thing that Anchor.fm do is to allow you to post the audio as a podcast episode on the iTunes podcast app and Pocket Casts for now. They have promised to deploy integration with other podcasting platforms in future updates of the app. But you also have apps like SoundCloud and WhatsApp which allow you to post audio. There’s very little room for excuses.

You might say that speaking is not your thing. Video freaks you out but you’re very cool with writing. No problem. There are just more platforms for that than audio and video. In fact, many platforms start off allowing text only then gradually integrate audio and videos. Those that start with voice and video recognize the importance of written words in comments. It is the comments which help to keep the conversation going after consuming the audio or video content.

There are many applications that we can use for writing. As a writer, you can start a blog. Starting a blog is simple. What we call Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in are nothing but blogging platforms. So by publishing on these and other social media platforms you’re blogging. If you’re posting on Medium, you’re a blogger. If you’re using WordPress, then you’re becoming a more serious blogger. But it’s blogging all the same.

Realize that we now have platforms that allow us to publish text, voice, and video as training grounds for starting media companies. When we take charge of our own media strategy, we begin to own our own stories. Those who tell their own stories control the memories we create for future generations. Our grandchildren will make their judgments about our legacy, but at least we will say through the content we leave behind. It is this content, these works which will define our legacy.